It's Come To This: Did Robert F. Kennedy Jr Just Praise Hitler?

A lot of people think he did. Here's why we shouldn't worry about it.

If you thought 2016 was a bizarre United States election year, 2024 is gearing up to give it a run for its money. Not only is Donald Trump back and running for a second term despite being under two federal indictments, a state indictment, and a civil suit for having raped somebody, but things are pretty bizarre on the Democrat side as well.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, nephew of the late president JFK, is challenging Joe Biden for the nomination, and he’s running on an almost entirely quack medical science/conspiracy theory ticket. And he’s picking up a disturbing amount of support.

This is not the weirdest image you will see in this article

Also, he may have sworn allegiance to Hitler recently. Yes, that Hitler. Or he may not have! It’s actually complicated!

Let’s back right up for a minute here.

It’s probably no shock to anybody that Robert F. Kennedy Jr turned out a little kooky. He is quite literally conspiracy theorist royalty. His uncle’s murder is the origin point of modern conspiracy culture, the Big One, unmatched in importance to the conspiracy community arguably until 9/11. His own father’s assassination cemented it.

RFK Jr’s pet cause, however, is the anti-vaccination movement. His relationship with the cause is complicated and one might say convoluted—he is not, unlike many others in the movement, a germ theory denialist. His spin on the matter does not extend to denying the mechanism through which the immune system operates or how a vaccine works. He claims that all of his kids are vaccinated.

The craziest anti-vax stuff you hear these days comes out of where the movement intersected with new age, religious, and spiritual aspects of modern conspiracy culture. The Mark of the Beast stuff. The aura disruption. The folks who will sneer and dismiss needles as allopathic in the same tone that you dismiss any antiquated and foolish folk technology.

RFK Jr is very much your granddad’s conspiracy theorist. He was, after all, born with the words “grassy knoll” in his mouth. The villains of his conspiracy narrative aren’t aliens or demons, they’re CIA. And his concerns are rooted in the real world with names like MKUltra and the Philadelphia Experiment. Secret government stuff. He doesn’t deny that vaccines work, he’s just scared of what someone might put in them behind closed doors.

Remember when it was this straight forward?

This strand of the conspiracy community leans heavily right wing. Which is why it was so eyebrow-raising that Kennedy decided he was going to run as a Democrat. Perhaps it is as simple as adherence to tradition—the Kennedy family are a Democratic dynasty. In politics, party affiliation can be almost akin to religion. A secular family will still call themselves Christian when pressed, if that’s their history.

Or maybe there’s something more insidious going on.

RFK Jr really doesn’t look much like a Democrat when you pull back the curtain and see the ghouls he’s running around with—people like Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, and the festering Alt-Reich Tumour King himself, Steve Bannon. He’s so shoulder-deep in the GOP dung pile that he was offered a position in the Trump administration.

It is Bannon, literally one of the worst people in the world, whose proximity to Bobby Jr is the biggest concern. Bannon is an extremely insidious strategist who revels in the long game. There are fears that Kennedy might even be some kind of plant deliberately being used to spoil Joe Biden’s campaign. In other words, a Manchurian Candidate. Ironically, a participant in a conspiracy.

He could be an old man with a famous name and infuriatingly naïve centrist politics who truly believes, as he claims, that hanging out and even making friends with Republicans, even extreme ones, is how he’s going to heal the divide and bring the country together. But then he goes and says some really, really wackadoodle shit.

Like, for example, recently he was caught on tape speculating that Covid-19 was engineered to target people based on their race, based on some idea he has that Ashkenazi Jews and Asians are mostly immune to it. Whenever someone says “Ashkenazi Jews,” it hits like someone addressing you needlessly by your first, middle, and last name—it’s never followed by anything good.

And then a few days later he came out and tweeted this:

It seems like an innocuous enough complaint, but for a lot of people who were nervous about the momentum of the Kennedy campaign, it ran their blood cold. Like scene out of CSI Miami, fingers pointed at screens and voices shouted “Enhance!”

Of all the digits in all the world that you could cram up against each other in a single tweet, he chose 1-4-8-8.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the number 1488 has a special significance to Neo-Nazis. It’s a combined reference to the so-called “14 words,” a white supremacist slogan, and the number 88, which is a short distance down the euphemistic treadmill from the letters HH, which stand for Heil Hitler. This isn’t paranoid speculation, it’s a real thing people tattoo on themselves.

Now surely—surely!—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not intend to tweet out a coded message that he loves Hitler. But this is Crazy Clown World now, where the points don’t mean anything and the rules don’t make sense anymore. Nothing is implausible anymore. We’re faced with a situation where we must give honest scrutiny to a question we would have dismissed out of hand ten years ago—Did Robert F. Kennedy Jr, heir to America’s most famous political dynasty, just pledge allegiance to Adolf Hitler as part of a major presidential campaign?

Because lots of Hitler fans think he did.

Now I’m going to come out and admit that I have not yet lost that final scrap of belief in sane reality, and I do personally believe that this was an accident. A stupid accident, if it was, and a once in a million coincidence. If you want to read his non-Hitler explanation about how those digits wound up in his tweet, you can skip next door to his own Substack and make up your own mind.

That’s not to say that I’ve completely made up my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time that somebody in Steve Bannon’s goblin army has done something like this. The fact that we have such a hard time determining whether or not this really happened is the whole point of it. It is a long and well established gaslighting strategy of the alt-right.

Oh yeah, remember the alt-right? Did you think they went away after Biden’s inauguration? We stopped hearing the term after Trump was dragged out of office because their boldness was tied to their team being the ones on the batting mound. They’ve just fallen back into a strategizing position again. The alt-right, the Pepe the Frog people, the so-called meme army of 4Chan—they’re still going all in on what worked last time. They have no reason not to.

This is just shades of the types of media-baiting that bubbled out from the various Chan boards in the lead up to Trump’s election and drove everyone mad last time—those who fell for the tricks and those of us who saw them for what they were could never quite see eye to eye. Remember this madness, for example:

Here’s how the technique works:

The goal is that you want to pull moderates, centrists, undecided voters and uninformed voters over to your side. And you want to do this by making your ideological opponents look crazy or hysterical.

The strategy is that you take something normal—like a ubiquitous hand sign, or a number, or an everyday object like milk…

…and you have a bunch of trolls draped in swastikas run around flashing the symbol and you tell the media that this is a Nazi thing. This is a thing Nazis do. Maybe you even have a whole narrative mapped out about how you’re going to explain it being a Nazi thing.

Here’s the thing—when a bunch of Nazis adopt something as a Nazi symbol, it becomes a Nazi symbol even if they were initially lying about it being one. But here’s the other problem: You still have normal people using it the normal, innocuous way. You still have people using the OK symbol to say “OK”…

…or, since the symbol is actually just the tip of the forefinger touching the thumb, you’re going to have people with an itchy head…

…and you’re not going to know for sure who is who. What you get is progressives legitimately identifying right wing extremism, but along the way, tilting at a whole bunch of windmills.

Sometimes you get a combination of situations. For example, here is Stephen Miller, who might actually be an unfrozen genetic clone of Hitler who lost a quarter of his brain and hair follicles during the cryogenic process, doing up a button:

Is he really, though? I don’t know!

Here’s what we know: It is possible, given the context of Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s admittedly bizarre and worrying comments about Covid and the Jews, that he has fallen into some kind of conspiracy fugue state and gone full Aryan Nation. I genuinely don’t think so, for what it’s worth. It’s also possible that a staffer, some troll on his campaign, one of Bannon’s people, either wrote this tweet or slipped him some fudged information to get him to tweet it himself. How ironic and fitting that a Kennedy would be a patsy.

It's also possible that this is all completely meaningless and coincidental.

We’ll probably never know for sure and we’ll tie ourselves in knots trying to figure it out. The fact is that the only way to win this game is not to play it. Because this is literally just the Don’t Look At The Chicken Game.

How do you play the Don’t Look At The Chicken Game? Allow me to illustrate:

In the end it really doesn’t matter if Robert Kennedy Jr is a Nazi, a GOP infiltrator, a crackpot, or just an old guy with wrong ideas, what matters is that he’s a bad candidate.

Don’t elect a bad candidate.